Communication

Caring and Archival Conservation

/ dwakimoto / 1 Comment

Happy Friday! I hope that your day is going well, even though it’s the thirteenth (and no, I’m not really superstitious). It’s a Friday and that’s a good thing. Today I just want to talk briefly about caring and archival conservation, then send you off with some fun videos for your tea breaks. So let’s get going.

On Tuesday was the second of two Protecting Cultural Collections workshops held at the lovely California Historical Society in San Francisco. Sponsored by the IMLS, these workshop series are supposed to help more cultural institutions (libraries, museums, and archives) create and implement disaster preparedness plans and also learn basics about salvage/conservation techniques. I will admit to almost falling asleep in the first half of the workshop, mainly because the room was freezing and the lights were dim, but the second half of the workshop made up for it because it was hands-on. I like doing things so working with water-logged materials and determining how to go about drying the materials was a lot of fun. I highly suggest the workshops if you need a brush up on the basics of salvaging materials or need to create a disaster plan. You can see a schedule of the upcoming workshops and register here. If you want more in-depth training for conservation, you’ll have to go elsewhere as that is not the point of the workshops.

In addition to getting me thinking about how much conservation work needs to be done to the materials in my archives, the workshops also got me thinking about caring in general. Not just caring for the collections, which sorely need it and which the one grant for preservation work we got is going to help in that aspect, but caring for and about cultural institutions and people on a more general level. These thoughts have also been bouncing around in my head due to a lovely post over on Ink and Vellum,We’ve built the brand. Now let’s build celebrities and due to reading a lot of Seth Godin’s work lately, including The Big Moo. After thinking quite a lot about this, among other things, I really believe that a lot of the problems in branding, funding, increasing statistics, etc. comes down to not showing people how much we care. Now before you raise your pitchforks, hear me out.

I’m not saying you don’t care, or your organization doesn’t care. I’m saying that people don’t perceive us as caring about their unique problems. I’m saying that we are all so stressed and overworked that it’s beginning to show and this leads to a vicious cycle of apathy and bad statistics that then leads management to want to try new fancy “actionable” steps and “measurable” outcomes. However, I think we need to simply think about the truth in one chapter of The Big Moo:

You could spend all your money and all your time trying to improve your customer service through one fancy technique or another. Or you could just care. And hire people who care.

When people know you care about them, they start caring about you. And when they care about you, they’ll seek you out for help with their research paper, or their job application, or their archival research. When they care about you, they are willing to listen to your story and your ideas for creating a better library or archives or museum with programming and services that matter to them. And if they really can see that you care and have proof that you care, they will tell their friends and family members and start spreading the word and helping you out. Having a support base is the only way that we are going to be able to survive and improve, and it’s really the only way that we’ll ever get “celebrity” librarians or archivists.

So that’s all I really have to say today. Workshops on archival conservation and disaster preparedness made me think about caring in all aspects of life, but especially in my work. So let me know what you think because I really do care and love to hear from you, dear readers.

Finally, here’s some fun stuff for your Friday study/work breaks. Check out this video: Super Tiny Apartment is an Amazing Transformer. It’s really nifty, although I don’t think I want to do that moving of furniture in my apartment. Also, for those of you that like design and especially typography, check out: What Font are You? It’s fun and let’s you read through all of the font personality types at the end.

And, of course, we need a great video to finish with so here’s the Doctor because, well, it’s the Doctor.

Have a wonderful rest of your day, a fantastic weekend, and I’ll be back next week with more library/archives/tech thoughts and news. Allons-y!

Work, Work, Work

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I hope everyone is having a lovely day. I can’t believe it is already May and it seems like we’ve gone straight from winter to summer here in the Bay Area. Today I just want to share a few links to help you at work or rather to help you do and feel better at work.

I decided today would be a good day to share these links because:

  1. I presented with three other awesome archivists on Saturday at the Society of California Archivists’ Conference on networking and employment, so it’s kind of on my mind. And, I’m sorry to report that the panel wasn’t taped for webcasting. I’ve got to get back into the habit of taping my talks for podcasting, but that’s neither here nor there.
  2. There have been a lot of useful and inspiring posts over the last week or so about work.

First, if you don’t already read Seth Godin’s blog or books, you should at least give his work a try. I find all of his work to be quick reads and very useful for giving me a swift kick in the pants to start doing valuable work. His post yesterday on Hard Work vs. Long Work is a great example. I love that his posts are usually short, pithy, and are like a little daily pep talk on getting out there and getting things done.

Lifehacker, of course, does not fail to deliver some good advice articles. I love this reminder to stay positive to boost your career. (Plus, it gives my officemate and me an excuse for our unrepentant optimism!) Lifehacker has a great summary on how to get respect at work (and you can read the full article over on the Art of Manliness and yes, it works for people who don’t want to be manly, too).

If you have any tips or advice for enjoying your work and being productive, please let me know in comments. I’m always interesting in hearing what works for other people.

And to end, check out this cool video of Festo’s AquaJelly robots:

Have a lovely rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday (hopefully) with a report from the BayNet talk by Lee Rainie from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Allons-y!

Visualizations

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! Can you believe that we are at the end of another work week? Time just speeds up in spring term. Anyway, today I wanted to share some interesting, pretty, and useful links about visualizations. So let’s get to the links and get you on your way to enjoying the weekend.

As so much information is conveyed in visual ways (as opposed to strictly textual), it behooves one to study good graphic designs and practice designing things. Today’s post is dedicated to a bunch of recent links coming over the feeds. (Plus, I just love design and can’t seem to go more than a few weeks without doing a post that is about, at least in part, design. Speaking of which, thanks to litbrarian to letting me know about fab.com which has a ton of design inspiration. If you want access, you can go here to request an invite as it is still in pre-launch phase.)

Okay, so getting to the actual links, if you want to create a website you should head on over to Lifehacker’s complete guide on how to make a website. Aren’t Lifehacker Night Classes just a bunch of fun? Plus, they are a friendly way to get one’s feet wet in record time and actually acquire some usable skills.

Who hasn’t heard of infographics? It is the buzzword in design lately. But before you go wild with infographics, check out Blue Glass’ post on diagnosing infographic bipolarity and learn some tips to making your infographics stand out, in a good way.

And no post about visualizations and graphics would be complete without a nod to Photoshop. So check out Gizmodo’s 10 quick and easy Photoshop tips. Don’t let Photoshop intimidate you. Just start playing with it and you’ll get the hang of creating awesome graphics and touching up photos in no time.

Oh, and while not strictly about visualization, check out the good news of new features of goo.gl. I really like goo.gl for link shortening, the statistics, and the QR Code generation.

Now moving on to some visualizations of food, or rather, some yummy recipes to try for your weekend and some awesome photos to look at while stuff is baking. As it is still wintry in a lot of the Northern Hemisphere, I suggest making some of Joy the Baker’s cheddar black pepper biscuits. They taste fantastic with a fried egg. And for dessert, I’d suggest chocolate bundt cake. I know people who don’t really like cake and they like this one. Also, If you love tea, you should check out the wonderful photographs of processing black tea from the National Anthropological Archives. Then go boil some water and have a cuppa.

Finally, I have to leave you with something cool to watch, so enjoy watching Festo’s Aqua Ray swim (really, it’s awesome):

Have a wonderful rest of your day, a lovely weekend, and I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on tech, archives, and libraries. Allons-y!

Analog, Digital, and Progress?

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday, dear readers! I hope your day is going well. We continue to have rather gloomy weather in the Bay Area, but it is also spring break so it all evens out in the end. Today I want to talk a bit about the analog versus digital, digital immigrant vs. digital native debate. This isn’t what I planned to write about today, but it is what I need to write about today or I’m never going to get the conversation points I was thinking about yesterday out of my head.

So analog versus digital. It’s kinda an overdone, oversimplified dichotomy, no? But this week, it seems to have come up rather frequently in multiple venues. (Bear with me, I’ll bring it all back to the libraries and archives in just a bit.) First there was the rather wonderful episode of Bones, The Blackout in the Blizzard. The bit with the microfilm reminded me of one of my fellow interns at the archives in Boston who was a huge proponent of eye-readable media and didn’t go for any of that “digitized stuff.” When the power goes out, you can still read microfilm so I suppose a point should go to analog in this case.

But the real reason I wanted to try to work out some thoughts about analog and digital is due to a conversation I had yesterday about digital natives. Apparently I missed the discussion on Twitter yesterday about digital natives (not surprising considering I was running around trying to get everything lined up for next quarter), so we discussed it during the afternoon tea break (not to worry, the tea break does not occur in the archives). The conversation made me think, always a good thing. One of the things that came up was the thought that digital natives consider digital solutions before analog ones and have a different mentalité than those of us who are digital immigrants. Okay, I’ll buy that for the sake of argument (even if I think the dichotomy is partially socially constructed). But is thinking of a digital solution to a problem necessarily progress?

In some regards, I would say yes. Some things are way better in digital form. Take searching old university catalogs if you are an archivist doing reference for a remote researcher. It’s much easier to search online than flipping through pages and pages of stuff. But for other things analog, though older, may be better. In a similar example, actually thinking of going through old catalogs to find information for finding aid notes if the information isn’t online instead of giving up and declaring the information to be unavailable. Or, in an example close to many people’s hearts as it is income tax season in the United States, check out Lifehacker’s article on how to send documents securely to your tax preparer. Hint: give them to the tax preparer in person. Like many things in life, digital didn’t make all of life easier, instead you just need to know and be proficient in finding information and solutions in multiple mediums.

Now, obviously I’m not a technophobe and do honestly believe there have been shifts in thinking and reasoning patterns due to the ubiquity of digital technologies. But I don’t think we should think of it as a zero sum game, or having to get rid of one to make room for the other. In other words, I think it is a false dichotomy, or at least an oversimplification and generalization to have analog pitted against digital or a “digital native” against a “digital immigrant.”

To end on a more positive note, because you know it can’t be all doom and gloom on this blog, yesterday’s conversation reminded me of Seth Godin’s recent blog post, Bring me Stuff That’s Dead, Please. Just because something isn’t the newest and shiniest thing to hit the digital (or analog) world, doesn’t mean it is dead. It just means, as Godin notes, that those thinkers, ponderers, and people that do the actual work have the time and experience to now really reflect and leverage the technologies. And that, my dear readers, is where the really fun stuff begins.

So to me, in the end, it isn’t about digital versus analog, it’s about what is the best tool for the job at hand and whether or not you have the experience and knowledge to actually know what is the best tool. Because progress is made by those who are fearless, experiment, and are open to incorporating new ideas into their knowledge base without throwing everything else out with last year’s technological bathwater.

I’m off my soapbox now. But I’d love to hear your thoughts about digital v. analog and digital native v. digital immigrant. I’m always up for conversation.

To end, here is this great video sent to me by one of my colleagues. If cats in an IKEA store don’t make you smile, I don’t know what will.

Have a fantastic rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday (hopefully) with some more technology news and thoughts.

Job and Weekend Stuff

/ dwakimoto

It’s Friday and the end of another week, thank goodness. Before getting to the few things I want to talk about today, I just want to share this link from Gizmodo, Japanese earthquake: How to respond and stay informed and also, hopefully soon, how to help/donate to the relief efforts.

In more fun news for this kind of gloomy Friday in the Bay Area (where luckily we haven’t had any real damage due to tsunamis), today I just want to share a few resources to help you with landing a job and to help you have a good weekend.

First, to the job information. It seems like you can’t get away from people talking about jobs and the economy, but I promise not to ramble on for too long. I just have two resources to share: this great article from WebWorkerDaily, landing your dream job in a networked world, and Lifehacker’s top 10 ways to rock your resume. Having now been on both sides of the hiring table in libraryland, I can’t tell you how shocked I was with the sloppy looking resumes applicants submit. If you want a professional position, make every effort to come across as a professional. Also, networking: overused word, but crucial to finding opportunities.

Speaking of job hunting, resumes, and interviewing, if you are a graduate student at San Jose’s School of Library and Information Science, come to or log in for the Resume & Interview Workshop tomorrow. It should be a very helpful event and I’ll be one of the panelists speaking at the event. So do come by and say hi.

Now on to a few bits of fun for your weekend and I do hope, dear reader, that you have a fun weekend planned. First, I have to share Lifehacker’s post on extending the life of your books by handling them properly. I feel it’s my duty as a librarian and archivist to share the link and give you a preservation resource to share with your friends and patrons.

And if you are having guests over this weekend, or you just fancy making something nice for yourself, I suggest trying Joy the Baker’s cinnamon sugar pull apart bread and/or lemon cornmeal breakfast cake. Her recipes are fantastic and have never let me down when it comes to baking up something lovely.

Finally, I leave you with this bit of the 2010 Doctor Who Proms. Really, it makes for a nice work/study break.

Have a lovely rest of your day, a fantastic weekend, and I’ll be back next week with more random thoughts on archives, libraries, and technology. Allons-y!

Economics: What are the costs of Personal Archiving?

/ dwakimoto

Last session. Let’s talk money!

Wishful Thinking
Jeff Ubois (PrestoCentre)

Issues: Predictability, Boundaries (commercial and non-commercial), Institutions/Individuals

Will always produce more than we have the resources to save.

Numeric was a study in Europe looking at scanning costs. Film is much, much more expensive to ingest than text pages. (Need to get study) Local contractor (price to store a box): $200 to $700. Storage costs vary widely.

NIH collects gene sequencing information and is going deaccession data because price of sequencing is dropping much more quickly than cost of storage space.

Millions of dollars have been spent creating complex cost models for archives.Gap between project based funding and need for perpetuity of data. Real estimates: Princeton: $5,000/TB (100x media cost), PrestoPRIME: 40x cost of raw media cost. Basis for buy a brick: endow a TB (interesting idea).

Roles for Commerce: Ingest scales well, cataloging & indexing, but what are the long term promises? Partnerships: huge commercial uncertainties can mean harsh terms.

Digitizing archives is a way to engage the public and bridge individuals and institutions. Lots of room for collaborations.

Paying for long-term storage
David S. H. Rosenthal (LOCKSS Program at Stanford)

Business Models
Rent (Amazon), Monetize the content (Gmail selling adverts on accesses to it), Endow the data (sufficient capital up-front to pay for preservation)

Digital preservation is vulnerable to interruption of revenue stream. Endowment provides a relatively predictable return, but need to figure out how much will need in the future. However, it rests on assumptions that storage is the major cost of preservation and Kryder’s Law (storage costs go down exponentially) will continue at least another decade. So endowment business model may not work. Storage costs go down, but associated costs are not going down as much (eg cooling, space, power costs).

Why Kryder’s Law Might Not Hold:
Desktop PC market is going away, next drive technology transition problematic, solid state disks.

You will get what you paid for: pay now, get service later (no leverage if service not delivered), need escrow service, if service fails, transfer data to successor.

All this means that estimating endowment need is very difficult. Also, it there is a marketing problem if telling people need 70x the cost of storing raw data to have perpetual preservation of the digital data. So, once again, we have an issue with figuring out how to get a reliable revenue stream in the archives.

Internet Archive
Brewster Kahle

Cost of hardware= 20% of the total cost. Lots of the cost goes to people’s salary. Luckily that increasing storage does not mean same amount of increase in number of people at the Internet Archive. If costs go down, expectations go up.

What helps us is that a petabye is a lot of storage space. “So people may be running out of stuff.” And Kahle believes that preservation must be done in a non-commercial way. Non-profits last a lot longer than many corporations.

“Love the Data”
Preserve the data in a way that people care about and make it so people can get to the data easily. “Access drives preservation.” Dark archives is not a good idea. (Out of sight out of mind)

Three issues at the Internet Archive
Costs
Perception of Rights Issue
Therapy (ego stuff)

How much does it cost to digitize a box of stuff? $100-$750 per box because a lot of variation in the type of stuff in boxes. You find a lot of random things in boxes. Costs about $15/video hour to digitize and film is about $300 per program hour to digitize. Books and microfilm= $0.10/page to digitize.

Born digital: Have upload button on Internet Archive website, then they back-up and add metadata.

Costs $1-$2 million to start up scanning/ingesting a new type of media in order to build relationships, get hardware, adapt software, etc.

Really want to start digital archives project for individuals, working with personal archives. New avenue for the Internet Archive.

Perspectives on Funding
Steve Griffin (Library of Congress/National Science Foundation)

Need to ask whether research funding is keeping up with the way research is now happening. May need to change funding models. Need effort by scholarly researchers to get federal funding agencies to change models so they work for today’s scholars.

Take away: Very difficult to estimate costs of long-term digital preservation and it costs a lot so we have a marketing problem when soliciting funding. But we need funding, so we’ve got to figure this out. Also, economies of scale are very important and if you give people an easy way to upload their data (a la Internet Archive), people will upload a ton of stuff. So let’s keep positive and make the changes in funding structures that will allow us to preserve our digital data for the long-term.

Teaching Outside the Library

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I can’t believe we are to the middle of another week already. For the last bit of this week, I’ll be at the Personal Digital Archiving Conference in San Francisco and will hopefully be blogging some of the sessions. However, first I want to talk about teaching outside of the library (aka one shots). Most academic librarians will, at one time or another, have to teach one shot classes, usually with too much information to cover in too short amount of time. But I don’t want to talk about the difficulties inherent in this type of format, I want to talk about how you can be effective in subtly nudging your way into being asked to come to classes, rather than feeling like you must claw your way to getting time to talk with students in class.

As many of you are aware, there is ample literature on teaching information literacy one-shot sessions. We won’t be going over that again here. I’m just going to share what has worked for me with the hopes that it may help those of you who also teach one shot sessions or are looking to increase the number of sessions you teach.

Before going further, I should give you fair warning that the majority of these techniques take months if not years to reap benefits, but I think that is okay. You can also make gains in the shorter term, as we’ll discuss, but because so much depends on personal relationships it takes time to really build up a sustainable and long lasting instructional program.

So first, the easy bits. You should, obviously, introduce yourself to your faculty members in your liaison areas. This should occur via email, at faculty gatherings, in the line at lunch, basically anytime you can get a minute of their time. Don’t go into stalker territory, but do be proactive about meeting people and sharing information about the libraries. It is always amazing how many faculty members don’t know about all the great databases my library has to offer for research. I don’t care what anyone says, connecting in person has been the most successful way for me to further the library’s instruction agenda and get into classrooms.

Now for some of the longer term and more involved ways of getting invited to come and speak with classes. I think these are the ways that create a truly sustainable basis for instructional programs and lead into becoming more embedded with classes. Again, I just have to stress that relationships take time to build, as most of us know, and that means that you may not see the rewards of these approaches for a couple of years. I have been at my current position for 2.5 years and am just now really reaping the benefits of taking time to cultivate relationships with many faculty members.

So what are my two pieces of advice?

  1. Get on university level committees or organizational boards if at all possible. Being on committees (even though I’m really not a huge fan of committees) does have the distinct advantage of forcing you to come into contact with faculty and staff members from many different departments. It’s a great way to show off your mad librarian organizational and research skills thus proving to others that librarians are very cool people with a lot to offer. This matters because, as trite as the saying is, actions really do speak louder than words. Prove your value on committees, sneak in some plugs for the library when appropriate, and you’ll be well on your way to being asked to come in and help with information literacy instruction in their classes. Really. It works. And this is one of the few reasons that I think committees are worthwhile, on the whole.
  2. Meet the people who run your faculty development office and offer to lead workshops on technology and library topics. This is one of the best ways I’ve found to help faculty with learning new technologies and meeting those who might want me to come into their classrooms at some later point. I, along with a few of my colleagues, teach many workshops for our faculty development office. It is a lot of fun and we almost always come away with new contacts and ideas for collaborative projects. For example, after a workshop on Google Sites, a professor had me come to work with his graduate students on creating e-portfolios using Google Sites. Students then contacted me for help with the technology and with research questions. And the professor and I are thinking about working on other projects and research studies together. Another faculty member came to one of our talks about online library resources and then had us come and work with her students on their research projects. Does it take work to prepare and teach these workshops? Of course, but it is definitely worth it if you are serious about making connections and getting out there to help in ways that are meaningful to the faculty and students.

I hope sharing my experiences help those of you who are instructional librarians. I’d love to hear about the best methods you’ve found to become more ingrained and essential in the teaching of information literacy, etc. in classes outside of those that may be run through the library department. Remember, connections take time to build, but they’re really the only way to accomplish great work and, you know, keep society going and all.

I hope you have a fabulous rest of your day, dear readers. I should be back tomorrow with some thoughts from the Personal Digital Archiving Conference. Fingers crossed for good wifi and not getting lost on the way to the conference. Take care and thanks, as always, for reading. Allons-y!

Civility and Tech Redux

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! I hope you are having a lovely day and have a relaxing weekend planned. I’m quite looking forward to the weekend as I’m going to go see cool books and manuscripts. If you are going to be at the Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco on Sunday morning, do stop by the ACRL’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section table to say hi. But back to the topics at hand. Today I just have a few articles, posts, and bits of information that connect to some of the conversations we’ve been having in the previous couple of weeks’ posts. So let’s get into the good stuff.

Touching back on the post on civility a few week’s ago, check out this interesting post on using airplane mode to silence your phone instead of mute or power. Personally, I don’t care what you do with your cell phone as long as you don’t pull it out every time it goes off while eating dinner with me. I’m probably very old school about this, but one of the most impressive things (and how sad is it that I find this impressive?) is when a person actually puts his/her phone on silent or airplane mode while we’re out to dinner or having coffee. I think it’s a sad comment on society that I was actually told by a colleague that he loved to talk to me because I would stop what I was doing and give him my full attention and he never had to wonder if I was actually listening.

Anyway, off the soapbox and onward to technology news.

This is a very nice article on the digitizing of Vassar’s Special Collections. It’s a concise look at many of the advantages and problems with digitizing special collections and archives. Issues of preservation, access, original v. digitized copy, and even microfilm all make an appearance. It’s a good article to pass on to those who either believe that “everything” is already available online or who complain that the entire archives’ holdings aren’t already online.

Speaking of articles that may be of use to archivists and librarians, take a look at The New York Times article on why some twitter posts catch on, and some don’t. For those archives and libraries using Twitter for access and marketing, this article brings up some points to consider–especially in the realm of hashtags.

Finally in tech news, it seems like there is always something interesting and useful to share about one of Google’s products and today is no different. Take a look at Lifehacker’s seven more easy ways to integrate your google apps. I really enjoy things that make my life easier and these hacks definitely make it easier.

This Friday we’ll end with this fabulous video someone made using Neil Gaiman’s reading of “The Day the Saucers Came.” I love this poem, but I hope, dear readers, that this is not how your upcoming Valentine’s Day ends.

Have a wonderful weekend filled with good books, friends, and fun. And if you feel inspired to bake this weekend, you might want to try Joy the Baker’s recipe for whole wheat chocolate brown sugar sugar cookies. I’ll be back next week with more musing on technology, libraries, archives, and other stuff.

On Getting Stuff Done Without Working 24/7

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I hope your week (and day) is going well. Today we’re going to talk about getting stuff done without working like a mad person 24/7. I think this is a good time to touch on the subject as it is still early in the new year and you may be experiencing the twin, somewhat dichotomous thoughts of 1. Oh, my goodness, who said it could be February? I have so much to do and so little time, while at the same time thinking 2. I have so much time. No need to panic, yet. So let’s talk about getting stuff done so you don’t panic and you do have time for a nap without feeling guilty (or needing a TARDIS or time-turner).

This isn’t expert advice on time management. In fact, I’m not sure what makes one an expert in time management. I suppose doing research studies. So I’ve not done any research studies, but I have been able to get quite a bit of work done without working 24/7, no matter how skeptical my work colleagues may be about that claim. So first a bit of context.

I’ve been at my current position for 2.5 years. It’s a tenure-track position so I’m expected to do research, publish, and serve on university-level committees. I also managed somehow to assume management of the University Archives during my second year on top of my position as one of the library faculty members. Oh, I also supervise SJSU Library School Student Interns who teach with us in the information literacy course that is mandatory for first-year students. My job also includes the usual things like reference and collection development, plus grant writing. I’m also, unsurprisingly, very into sharing my love and knowledge of technology with others so I often teach workshops for the Faculty Development Office. So, my work life is pretty busy.

With my workload, and the workload of librarians and people in general, it is easy to be sucked into the vicious cycle of working 24/7 because you need to be connected 24/7. I thought like that when I first started my current position, and I literally had no life. I worked through the weekends, developed a wicked case of insomnia, and basically was looking at burnout before my first year was up. Obviously something had to change and I’ll tell you what I did, and no, this isn’t one of those “happy thought” advice columns about giving up what you don’t like and only doing what you do like–that’s not realistic and I’m definitely a realist (or an insane optimist, it depends on who you ask). So here’ my advice for not working insane hours and still getting insane amounts of work done:

  1. Don’t even think about multi-tasking. Multi-tasking as a productivity tool is a myth. Except for listening to music when I work, I don’t multi-task. I single task. When I’m in hardcore writing mode, I basically shut down my internet connection and everything else, but my writing program. I refuse to bounce around among multiple tasks. I single task and it completely increases my efficiency.
  2. Be ruthless about your to-do list. I write my to-do list on a Post-it each day and then just get into it, no matter how much I don’t want to do something. I’ve gotten pretty good at estimating how much I can get done in a day and I find it satisfying to cross things off my list
  3. Get to work early. I admit that I’m lucky in the fact that I’m a morning person. (If we are being completely honest, I’m more of a siesta person–work early in the morning, take a nap during my slump time which is around mid-afternoon, and work later in the afternoon to the evening. But that schedule doesn’t work here, so let’s get back to getting to work early.) Most of my faculty colleagues aren’t morning people and don’t show up until around an hour or so after I’ve gotten to work. Without interruptions, I get a ton of work done. Plus morning hours are usually my most productive times of day in terms of creativity, writing, and other tasks that require a significant concentration level. Basically find the time that is most productive for you and safeguard it against interruptions.
  4. Don’t indulge in any perfectionist leanings or tendencies to procrastinate. If you want to ship work, as Seth Godin would say, you need to do the work and then get it out the door. In order to do excellent work, you need to do the work! Being a perfectionist will only keep you from getting work done and procrastinating will keep you from ever starting the work. Inertia can be a terrible or wonderful thing, dear readers.
  5. Leave work at work. I no longer stay at work for horribly long days as much as possible and I leave my work at work. I don’t take work home because if I can’t get it done in the 8-9 hours that I’m at work, it can just wait until tomorrow. Now, since I’m an instructor, I do have to answer student emails at home and sometimes work can’t be avoided. But my pretty firm rule is that work doesn’t come home with me.
  6. Say no to extra projects (and committees) when you don’t have time, have no interest, are able to say no and/or all of the above. Now I know you can’t say no to every unappealing project or committee that comes your way, but you should get used to flexing your “no” muscle on those occasions where saying “yes” will only increase your stress level and workload and not really help you in any way. It took me a while to be okay with saying no to people and raising objections to projects I knew wouldn’t work out. But flexing that “no” muscle is the surest way to keep your workload to at least a semi-manageable level.
  7. Get some sleep. Honestly, just get more sleep, it will help. Just listen to this video (it’s funny and makes a compelling case for getting more sleep). If you take nothing else away from this list of advice, please take away that you need to sleep. You will be more effective and efficient, not to mention feel better, if you get some sleep. Being sleep deprived isn’t a badge of honor, it’s bad for you and your health.
  8. Find something you are passionate about outside of work and someone(s) with which to share it. I don’t think it matters whether you are passionate about art, collecting coins, or finding the best tea shop in the neighborhood, as long as you have something fun to look forward to outside of work. And, hopefully, you have awesome people to share in your love of whatever outside of work. I love my work, and I’m hopefully that you do too. I love working with the students, doing my research, going to conferences, helping people, etc., but I also know that it’s important to get out of the archives and library mindset. Don’t forget your friends, your family, your hobbies, and having fun while you are climbing the professional ladder.

So that’s really all I have to say about that. I hope it inspires you to at least think about not working 24/7. If you have tips or stories about what has worked for you, I’d love to hear about it in comments.

And finally, to end, check out this interesting video by BBC Horizon, What is Reality?.

Have a fantastic rest of your day and I’ll be back with some tech news on Friday. Allons-y!

Friday Design Fun

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! Are you ready for the weekend? I was ready for the weekend on Monday night so I’m quite looking forward to relaxing this weekend. First though we should talk a little about design, mobile devices, reading, and writing.

It should be apparent by now, dear readers, that I have a weakness for good design. I love well-designed products, processes, and beautiful visuals. So I was rather excited about Lifehacker’s article, learn the basics of design this weekend. Just ignore most of the comments on the article, most of them are quite unhelpful to those wanting to learn design, but the comment by Ignition on the “hipster” nature of the other commenters is great. And if you have any favorite design resources, please share them in comments. I always like to learn more about design. One of my favorite design resources is Before & After. Their book, How to Design Cool Stuff is a great resource for anyone who wants an easy to understand explanation of design that you can apply to projects almost immediately. And never underestimate the value of playing around with Photoshop, Gimp, or Aviary. I’m a big believer in clicking buttons and seeing what happens. Not exactly scientific, I know, but very fun.

And you can apply your newly found/improved design sense on designing for mobile devices. You should also really check out this great slideshow, Designing Mobile Experiences. It is one of the best I’ve seen at describing the mobile design process and the factors to consider when planning, designing, and implementing experiences, be they native apps or web apps, for mobile devices. It’s really worth going through the entire slide deck.

After you get through the slide deck, check out the article, Is mobile affecting when we read? However, if you are reading this on your iPad, you’ll probably save this article to read for later. No matter. It is still a very good read.

Finally, check out Lifehacker’s why you learn more effectively by writing than typing. Seems to make sense and anecdotally, writing out notes instead of typing them is what got me through my undergrad years of studying biology.

Now, on to the last bit of fun for this Friday post, check out this great video, Every Doctor Who Story 1963-2008 (thanks to Hanna for sharing):

Have a wonderful rest of your day, a fantastic weekend, and I’ll be back next week with more interesting bits of news and fun.